This title was first published in 2002. Adrian Stokes was a British painter and writer whose books on art have been allowed to go out of print despite their impact on Modernist culture. This new edition of The Quattro Cento and The Stones of Rimini presents the original texts of 1932 and 1934 and furnishes them with introductions by David Carrier and Stephen Kite that will help readers grasp the structure and significance of what have become Stokes' most widely cited and influential books. Written as parts of an incomplete trilogy, The Quattro Cento and The Stones of Rimini mark a crossroad in the transition from late Victorian to Modernist conceptions of art, especially sculpture and architecture. Stokes continued, even expanded, John Ruskin's and Walter Pater's belief that art is essential to the individual's proper psychological development but wove their teaching into a new aesthetic shaped by his experience of psychoanalysis and recent innovations in literature, dance, and the visual arts. This volume will be of interest to those concerned with art criticism, aesthetics and psychoanalysis, as well as the art and architecture of the Renaissance and Modern periods. Supported by the Henry Moore Foundation in memory of David Sylvester.

Adrian Stokes (1902-1972) was a British painter and author whose writings on art have been allowed to go out of print despite their impact on Modernism and ongoing acclaim for their beauty and intellectual acuity. Two of his most influential books, The Quattro Cento of 1932 and Stones of Rimini of 1934, are brought together for the first time in this new volume, which includes all their original illustrations. This new edition also provides a foreword by Stephen Bann and introductions by David Carrier and Stephen Kite that place Stokes's masterworks in the context of early twentieth-century culture and discuss their structure and relevance to today's experience of art and architecture.Written as parts of an incomplete trilogy, The Quattro Cento and Stones of Rimini mark a crossroads in the transition from late Victorian to Modernist conceptions of art, especially sculpture and architecture. Stokes continued, even extended, John Ruskin's and Walter Pater's belief that art is essential to the individual's proper psychological development but wove their teaching into a new aesthetic shaped by his analysis with Melanie Klein and recent innovations in literature, dance, and the visual arts.Few writers have been able to invoke the material presence of works of art in the way Stokes does in The Quattro Cento and Stones of Rimini. They combine travel writing with acts of looking spun out so as to reinterpret the imposing legacy of the Italian Renaissance through an aesthetic of the direct carving of stone, which has parallels in the sculpture of Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth but was for Stokes the discovery of artists in fifteenth-century Italy. To his way of thinking, there then arosea realization that the materials of art "were the actual objects of inspiration, the stocks for the deepest fantasies." During the Renaissance, Stokes maintained, stone accordingly "blossomed" into sculpture and buildings,

Introduction / Stephen Bann -- Stokes and the architectural basis of the sculptural / Alex Potts -- "A deep and necessary commerce": Venice and the "architecture of colour-form" / Stephen Kite -- "The house of the mind": on Piero, perspective, and psychoanalysis / Peter Leech -- "We are exalted": Adrian Stokes's coming to terms with Michelangelo's massiveness / David Hulks -- Stokes's analysis / Richard Read -- Portrait of an analyst: Adrian Stokes and Melanie Klein / Lyndsey Stonebridge -- Healing art, healing Stokes / Janet Sayers -- "Showing openly the inside of action": place, ballet, psychoanalysis / Martin Golding -- The art historian as art critic: in praise of Adrian Stokes / David Carrier -- "Inferential muscle" and the work of criticism: Michael Baxandall on Adrian Stokes and art-critical language / Paul Tucker -- To bring the distant things near: distance in relation to the work of art in Stokes's thought / Etienne Jollet -- Stones of solace / Michael Ann Holly.

Freud's account of the sublimated drives at work beneath the surfaces of advanced societies, alongside the modernist fictions of Joyce, Proust, Kafka, Woolf and others, both reflected and inaugurated a strain of modernism preoccupied with the darkest elements of the human psyche. In The Destructive Element Lyndsey Stonebridge examines the career and legacy of British psychoanalyst Melanie Klein as a lens through which to examine the 20th century's fascination with death drives, the sublimation of civilization's discontents and the socialization of children--fascinations that would surface throughout the cultural production of the West. At once cultural history and psychoanalytic theory, and a bold reformulation of the legacies of modernism, The Destructive Element is an essential contribution to our understanding of the Western tradition.

Adrian Stokes (1902-72) - aesthete, critic, painter and poet - is among the most original and creative writers on art of the twentieth century. He was the author of over twenty critical books and numerous papers: for example, the remarkable series of books published in the 1930s; The Quattro Cento (1932), Stones of Rimini (1934), and Colour and Form (1937) that embraced Mediterranean culture and modernity. His criticism extends the evocative English aesthetic tradition of Walter Pater and John Ruskin into the present, endowed by a stern sensibility to the consolations offered by art and architecture, and the insights that psychoanalysis affords. Indeed, for Stokes architecture provides the entree into art, and this book is the first study to comprehensively examine Stokess theory of art from a specifically architectonic perspective. The volume explores the crucial experiences through which this architectonic awareness evolved; traces the influence upon Stokes of places, texts and personalities, and examines how his theory of art developed and matured. The argument is supported by appropriate illustrations to confirm the evidence that Stokess claim for architecture as mother of the arts carries the deepest experiential and psychological import.

This book uses the contradictions, fractures and coincidences of a twentieth-century rural landscape to explore new methods of writing place beyond 'new nature writing'. In doing so it opens up new ways of reading modernist artists and writers such as Vanessa Bell, Mary Butts and Paul Nash.